Published

24tips: nicer fonts on the web

8 Dec: My first Mac had a black and white screen, 1MB of memory and had to be started from a floppy disk. But it had a wonderful library of fonts, from the serious to the wacky and creating posters or flyers was a dream – driven in no small measure by Steve Jobs’ personal passion for typography. Around the same time, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was creating the web, but it looks like he didn’t share Steve’s passion. For a long time, the web was a wasteland of Times New Roman.

And frankly, it still is in many ways – with the majority of the web still set in Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Georgia… or a bit of Comic Sans for the fun stuff.

Typekit: this is one a of new breed of services offering a library of fonts that you can build into packages, and import into your site via Javascript for a low monthly subscription. Once the package is linked up, you can access your new fonts using CSS. There are alternative services, including Fonts.com

Google Web Fonts: Google has taken a similar approach to Typekit using a small library of freely-available fonts, enabling you to embed them quickly and easily and use them on your site

Identifont: this nice utility lets you search for fonts by name, and get a list of similar looking ones from other foundries – great if you can’t quite get the font you want from a hosted service but want to get close to it

Couple of quick questions: does this stuff work in IE6? Yes, seems to. What about the mobile web? Hmm, varies: Mobile Safari doesn’t seem keen, but players like Typekit are working on it, they say.